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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9718333" data-attributes="member: 42582">From the perspective of an external observer, there is no "most likely" meaning of the runes. That's like asking a reader of LotR, who gets to the picture of the Moria doorway, to guess what is the "most likely" password to open the gates. In the fiction, we know that Gandalf forms conjectures. He is reasoning; but the reader of the fiction doesn't know what his reasoning consists in.Similarly when Gandalf says "I now know where we are. This must be, as Gimli says, the Chamber of Mazarbul; and the hall must be the twenty-first of the North end. Therefore we should leave by the eastern arch of the hall, and bear right and south, and go downwards. The Twenty-First Hall should be on the Seventh Level, that is six above the level of the Gates. Come now! Back to the hall!" The reader of the book can't confirm any of this, or reach this conclusion independently.In a RPG, who gets to determine things like what magic word will open this gate? or what information about my location in this place can I obtain from learning that I'm in such-and-such a room? One well-known answer is the GM. That is not the only answer.In the game I described, the player makes an action declaration because he wants to reduce or eliminate the complication that has been inflicted on his character - and given that that complication is Lost in the Dungeon, he needs to declare an action that, if successful, will help the character become unlost. I've known this player for around 30 years, and so can confidently say also that he generally declares actions that he thinks are fun, and interesting, and true to his character and to the fiction.The player knows - because I as GM have declared it as part of framing the scene - that there is a Strange Runes scene distinction. So it is fun and interesting to incorporate that into an action declaration. In MHRP, scene distinctions are intended to be played with, and to be incorporated by players into their action declarations.The character also has the following milestone:WANDERER 1 XP when you compare your current situation to some past event or place you have seen. 3 XP when you use a Transition Scene to prepare a strategy that draws upon your past experience. 10 XP when you either abandon the quest to resume your wanderings, or you are persuaded to cease your wanderings and settle down.I don't recall years after the event, but it wouldn't surprise me if the player earned an XP by stating some comparison of the strange runes to something the character had seen before. As with the example of Wolverine that I posted above (and which is from a published source for MHRP), this game encourages the players to riff on the GM's framed scenes, and embellish them with their own ideas about backstory and context and meaning.You ([USER=7025577]@Enrahim[/USER]) talk about "how a simulation should behave". Oxford Languages, via Google, gives me:simulation = imitation of a situation or process. "simulation of blood flowing through arteries and veins"The situation or process in this episode of play is a character who stands out for being a Solitary Traveller and a Cunning Expert (given that these descriptors are there on the PC sheet) comes upon Strange Runes while Lost in a Dungeon, and tries to read them based on a conjecture that they might reveal a way out.And that is what has been imitated, in building the pool of dice with the intention of using a successful effect die to reduce or eliminate the complication.If someone wants to insist that, because the player is not reasoning and discovering there is no simulation of the character reasoning and discovering, then they are using the word "simulation" in some non-standard sense that needs explanation. I don't see how the role of the GM in authoring backstory is not going to be part of that explanation.</blockquote>

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